Io

Io Matua Kore (Māori for “Io the Parentless who was always existent without beginning or end”) is in some Māori traditions the supreme god.

The Io tradition was restricted to only the highest Tohunga (“priest” or “expert”, the Māori equivalent of the Hawaiian “Kahuna”). According to Nga Puhi reverend Māori Marsden who received the Io tradition from his grandfather, Io is:

“both Being-itself and absolute Nothingness. That is, He is truly infinite, encompassing within himself both the absolutely Positive and absolutely Negative.”
Māori Marsden’s grandfather was born in about 1790, was a signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi and died in 1908. Māori Marsden himself was tohied, ‘consecrated and dedicated’, by a group of elders when he was about 8 years old. The Io tradition could be interpreted as a belief of Non-Dualism/Monism and similar to the idea described variously as the Void, the Is, Emptiness, or the mind of God.

Io lived eternally in i te korekore, “the absolute nothingness”. The Korekore is a double negative, a double kore. According to Māori Marsden, to the Māori mind, the doubling of kore. meant

“…not simply ‘non-being’, or annihilating nothingness, though it includes this meaning, but it went beyond this. By means of a thorough-going negativity, the negation itself turns into the most positive activity. It is the negation of negation. Te Korekore is the infinite realm of the formless and undifferentiated. It is the realm not so much of ‘non-being’ but rather of ‘potential being’. It is the realm of Primal and Latent energy from which the stuff of the Universe proceeds and from which all things evolve.”